What to Do After A Binge

So you binged. You just went through your cupboards, your refrigerator and the burger shop down the block and just about obliterated every food morsel in sight. Your pants feel tight, your stomach (and every other part of your body) feels huge, and you feel like dying. What to do now?

1. Don’t purge. I know it’s really hard to hold back from it, especially if you’ve done it before, but it will not benefit you in any way.

2. Don’t reduce your calorie intake for tomorrow (or any of the days following) to nothing.It might seem like a logical plan, but if you restrict tomorrow, you’ll never get into a normal cycle of eating. You’ll be constantly ricocheting between binge and purge, starve and binge, purge and starve. You’ll never be eating normally.

3. Remember that it takes 3500 EXCESS calories to gain a pound. It’s highly unlikely your stomach can even hold this much, much less double that, so it’s very unlikely you’ll gain more than two pounds from this! Your progress is not back at zero. Your efforts so far are not null. This is just a little bump in the road.

4. Put on comfy clothes. Honestly. Tight clothes will just make you feel worse. Feeling bad = more binging. Take off those tight jeans, and put on some cozy sweats.

5. Use your binge as a learning experience. What triggered it? Did you feel out of control? Did you actually want all the food you were eating, or were you just eating for eating’s sake? Did you even like the taste of some of it? Do you think you binged because you deprived yourself of a treat you wanted earlier? Did you binge because you’ve been starving all day and just couldn’t take it anymore? Try and understand your binge, understand what your mind went through when your hands were reaching for all that food. The more you can understand the reasons behind your binge, the better you’ll be next time at preventing them. For more information on how your brain can trick you into binging when its not getting enough nutrients, click here and here.

6. Remember that you are NOT a failure, bad for eating, undeserving of life, or ugly because you decided to give yourself what you really wanted.

Now for the fun part.

Tomorrow, wake up all bright and sunny. Leap right out of bed (Note: when wondering how to get out of bed, the answer is always “leap.”) Have a delicious bowl of healthy for breakfast and get really excited about feeling awesome all day because of all the healthy food you’re going to bless your body with. Take a walk, if you’d like to. Smile all day long. Drink some water. 

But don’t purge and don’t restrict. Eat how you’d normally eat, cause you’re a normal eating healthy person who does not fall prey to freak eating cycles. You don’t need that shit, look at you, you’re hot as hell. Click here for the finale.

How Bulimia Affects Your Body

Why Starving Seems to Work

It’s hard to explain to someone who has nearly or fully starved themselves for a few days that what they’re doing isn’t effective. The proof is right there on the scale, right? Two pounds, five pounds, ten pounds flushed from their bodies like that, simply from not eating.

Wrong. Losing real weight from starving is physically impossible. Your body absolutely can not lose that much weight in a week. It’s not because you weren’t working hard enough, or didn’t starve for long enough. It’s because you can’t do it, just like you can’t grow gills and live underwater like a fish.

Here’s what happens when your body is starved of nutrients:

Your body realizes that it needs energy to continue to function, to blink and breathe and scratch your forehead. All of this requires power source, and it has to get it from somewhere. When you don’t give your body the energy it needs from food, it cannibalizes itself as an energy source. The prime directive of the body is that it must have energy at any cost.

The protein in your muscles is the only energy source a starving person has, and since you aren’t eating, it’s the only choice you are left with. Your body will begin to destroy muscle cells to release that protein so it can convert it into energy. Muscles are about 70% water, so when a muscle cell is destroyed, that water is released and eventually excreted. That’s your weight loss.

Your body didn’t convert any lumpy fat into lean muscle. It didn’t begin to use fat as an energy source. It didn’t just magically get rid of three or four pounds of pure fat. It’s going to keep you alive at any cost, and that means burning up the muscle and using that to power you. Guess what? You’ve just increased your body fat percentage. Fat weighs less than muscle and takes up more space, so you might even look bigger than before.

You’ve also lowered your metabolism. Muscle is metabolically active tissue, so the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate. The next bite of food you take, your body will use less efficiently and will hold on to much longer, converting it into fat and storing it for the long famine ahead.

Starving is not an effective weight loss tool. Not just because you shouldn’t starve yourself, not just because of the incredibly dangerous effects it has on your brain, not just because it can ruin your body forever. It really doesn’t work.

If you continue to starve yourself, your body will never got over that period of starvation.Your brain is programmed for survival, not for skinny, and you’ll become permanently hardwired to think that there is never enough, that you are constantly starving, even when you’re not.

Anorexia and Bulimia are extreme psychological diseases. and the above is your body’s evolutionarily hardwired response to trying desperately to survive on so very little nutrients. It is not your fault. If you’re struggling with starving, please consider getting help.

Minnesota Starvation Study

In 1950, Minnesota conducted a six-month starvation study on 36 young, psychologically and physically healthy men. More than 100 men volunteered for the study as an alternative to military service; the 36 selected had the highest levels of physical and psychological health, as well as the most commitment to the objectives of the experiment.  Note that none of these men had any sort of unhealthy body image, preoccupation with food, or known mental disorders of any kind.

During the first 3 months of the semi-starvation experiment, the volunteers ate normally while their behavior, personality, and eating patterns were studied in detail. During the next 6 months, the men were restricted to approximately half of their former food intake and lost, on average, approximately 25% of their former weight.

One of the changes immediately observed in the volunteers was a dramatic increase in food preoccupations. The men found concentration on their usual activities increasingly difficult, because they became plagued by incessant thoughts of food and eating.

During the semi-starvation phase of the experiment, food became a principal topic of conversation, reading, and even daydreams. Rating scales revealed that the men experienced an increase in thinking about food, as well as corresponding declines in interest in sex and activity during semistarvation.

As starvation progressed, the number of men who toyed with their food dramatically increased. Those who ate in the common dining room smuggled out bits of food and consumed them on their bunks in a long-drawn-out ritual. Toward the end of starvation some of the men would dawdle for almost two hours after a meal which previously they would have consumed in a matter of minutes. Cookbooks, menus, and information bulletins on food production became intensely interesting to many of the men who previously had little or no interest in dietetics or agriculture.

In addition to cookbooks and collecting recipes, some of the men even began collecting coffeepots, hot plates, and other kitchen utensils. One man even began rummaging through garbage cans. This general tendency to hoard has been observed in starved anorexic patients and even in rats deprived of food.

The Minnesota subjects were often caught between conflicting desires to gulp their food down ravenously and consume it slowly so that the taste and odor of each morsel would be fully appreciated. Toward the end of starvation some of the men would dawdle for almost two hours over a meal which previously they would have consumed in a matter of minutes. They took much planning as to how they would handle their day’s allotment of food.

During the eighth week of starvation, one volunteer flagrantly broke the dietary rules, eating several sundaes and malted milks; he even stole some penny candies. He promptly confessed the whole episode, and became self-deprecatory. While working in a grocery store, another man suffered a complete loss of will power and ate several cookies, a sack of popcorn, and two overripe bananas before he could “regain control” of himself. He immediately suffered a severe emotional upset, with nausea, and upon returning to the laboratory he vomited. He was self-deprecatory, expressing disgust and extreme self-criticism.

Although the subjects were psychologically healthy prior to the experiment, most experienced significant emotional deterioration as a result of semistarvation. Most of the subjects experienced periods during which their emotional distress was quite severe; almost 20% experienced extreme emotional deterioration that markedly interfered with their functioning. Depression became very severe during the course of the experiment.

For most subjects, anxiety also became evident. As the experiment progressed, many of the formerly even-tempered men began biting their nails or smoking because they felt extremely nervous. Two subjects developed disturbances of “psychotic” proportions. One man became so distressed he cut off three fingers of his own hand.

As the six months of semi-starvation progressed, the volunteers exhibited many physical changes, including gastrointestinal discomfort; decreased need for sleep; dizziness; headaches; hypersensitivity to noise and light; reduced strength; poor motor control; edema (an excess of fluid causing swelling); hair loss; decreased tolerance for cold temperatures; visual disturbances and auditory disturbances and paresthesias (i.e., abnormal tingling or prickling sensations, especially in the hands or feet).

After the six-month starvation period, the subjects were placed on a gradual refeeding period. For five months after, nearly all the men still experienced extreme psychological changes.

Although originally quite gregarious, the men became progressively more withdrawn and isolated. Humor and the sense of comradeship diminished amidst growing feelings of social inadequacy. The volunteers’ social contacts with women also declined sharply during semistarvation. Those who continued to see women socially found that the relationships became strained. “It’s almost too much trouble to see her even when she visits me in the lab,” one subject states. “It requires effort to hold her hand. If we see a show, the most interesting part of it is contained in scenes where people are eating.”

The single most astounding finding of this study was that many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually symptoms of starvation itself. Your body is wired for survival and by consciously putting yourself into starvation, you are inadvertently but VERY ACTIVELY putting these same thoughts into place. None of the men fully recovered from their extreme obsession with food:

“Subject #20 stuffs himself until he is bursting at the seams, to the point of being nearly sick and still feels hungry; #120 reported that he had to discipline himself to keep from eating so much as to become ill; No. 1 ate until he was uncomfortably full; and subject #30 had so little control over the mechanics of “piling it in” that he simply had to stay away from food because he could not find a point of satiation even when he was “full to the gills.”…”I ate practically all weekend,” reported subject #26…Subject #26 would just as soon have eaten six meals instead of three.

Their bodies never got over that period of starvation. Their minds became permanently hardwired to think it was never enough, there was never enough food, they had to eat, eat, eat or they would starve to death. They were all psychologically completely healthy before the experiment.

Anorexia and Bulimia are extreme psychological diseases. Starvation itself causes these feelings even in 100% healthy people. Please, please, please do anything you can to avoid putting yourself in this mindset, and if you are already having these feelings, realize that they’re the result of starving, your body’s evolutionarily hardwired response to trying desperately to survive on so very little nutrients. It is not your fault.